Opening savings accounts after selling your house

robertharry

Here is a tip if you are thinking of selling your house, renting and investing your capital

Due to the 35,000 situation one wants to open a lot of accounts and its OK following the information on here about who owns who and what the best rates are but what noone has mentioned is how hard and frustrating it is to open them.

As there are strict money laundering and fraud rules they need to establish proof of indentity and proof of address. As you have moved and have only been at your new address for one month they cant do it online and ask you to send in passports etc and bills and bank statements etc . The problem is that it is taking time for them to come in with the new address and you start to run out of things to send trying to open many accounts. They are also very inflexible. I sent an original letter from my solicitor confirming the sale of the house and quoting both the old address and the new address and my name. It was not acceptable as not on their formal list. Clearly no commonsense is allowed to apply.

Anyway after nearly 6 weeks of letters backwards and forwards I am getting a few open but the bulk of the money is in my Barclays standard savings account at 4%....

My tip is before you move open all the accounts from your old long standing address with a minimum amount of money in each. On selling your are set up to move the money immediately and then write to each one changing your address.

tradetime

A second tip, if practical (I realise this one depends on where you live) is to open accounts with institutions that have branches near you, that way you can do the verification at the local branch, even if it's an online account.

Meltdown_2

robertharry wrote: »

Clearly no commonsense is allowed to apply.

Never a truer word ...
In my view, this is one of the biggest problems we have with banks/BS nowadays.

My tip is before you move open all the accounts from your old long standing address with a minimum amount of money in each. On selling you are set up to move the money immediately and then write to each one changing your address.

An excellent tip!

altyfc

Perhaps you are better off opening all these accounts with a £1 before you sell the house where you live...?

Personally, I think selling a house, moving to rented and hoping for a drop in the housing market is a very risky business. Lots of people did this 5 years ago, didn't they? Where are they now?

Bizmarque

Where are they?

I'm in a rented property, as we sold and couldn't find anything suitable, two years ago. The cash is making reasonable return, and I'm in a house I'm happy with in the short term. It seems locally, that house prices are slowly sliding, as I watch from the sidelines. I'd be interested to know how this is seen to be a bad position to be in? Admittedly I'm no speculator and didn't plan the price decrease but had I known I would have still done the same....

moanymoany

We have just done this and are now in rented. It's a bit late for the advice to do it before moving - though it is excellent advice - so I think we will go with tradetime's advice. Where I live there is a wide choice of places to save on reasonable rates.

We have done this for two reasons. The first is that by having no chain ahead of us we were in a good position for buyers. The second is that we are retiring to another town and want to be in a cash buyer position.

However, there is no doubt that house prices are falling and waiting six months before buying will not mean prices gallop away ahead of us. It is a matter of keeping an eye on the market. I don't think that it is going to get much easier as the LIBOR cost of borrowing is higher than the BOE interest rate.

Lenders are also going to want decent deposits, I know that there are FTB who are saving up or who have saved up, but many will have to completely change their lives to stop spending, get out of debt and then save. That is going to take them some time to achieve!

altyfc

Bizmarque wrote: »

Where are they?

I'm in a rented property, as we sold and couldn't find anything suitable, two years ago. The cash is making reasonable return, and I'm in a house I'm happy with in the short term. It seems locally, that house prices are slowly sliding, as I watch from the sidelines. I'd be interested to know how this is seen to be a bad position to be in? Admittedly I'm no speculator and didn't plan the price decrease but had I known I would have still done the same....

Two years ago is a bit different to five.

The point I was making was that many people thought we'd reached peak long ago, and sold up with the intention of getting a good deal when everything crashed. That crash didn't happen (and hasn't yet). Rather, prices continued to creep upwards. I'm not saying prices won't fall - I just think it's a big gamble to sell up with the hope/expectation that they might/will.